


Sum of Our Parts

by Croik



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 17:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5751145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Croik/pseuds/Croik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Keeper, furthest from his master's sight, held a particular purpose within the nightmare, and one he was determined to carry out.  Written as a pinch hit for Secret Mobius Agent #10 in the TEW Gift Exchange, 2015!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sum of Our Parts

**Author's Note:**

> One of the prompts from my assignment was an exploration of the game's monsters, so it felt like the perfect time to indulge a few smaller head-canons of mine I haven't had the excuse to explore yet. Sorry this took so long, but I hope you like it, secret agent!

When Ruben was a young boy, he and Laura often played up and down the mansion grounds. Sometimes they would venture as far as the gate, grip the bars and watch the occasional truck pass by. They would laugh to each other and speculate on the lives of the townspeople, so eager to return to their mysterious lives.

Once, a man stopped. Ruben clung to his sister's dress as he approached, greeting them with a tipped hat and a broad smile. He saw them out there all the time, he said. He hoped to one day do business with their father, he said. He gave them a cherry pie cooked by his wife, wrapped in foil and still warm from the oven. He tipped his hat again and he left.

"We should eat it ourselves before Father finds out," said Laura as they started back toward the house, but Ruben shook his head. Mother had raised them to be honest.

Laura was right, of course. When their father heard who had brought the offering, he cursed the man and threw it away. The dish struck the edge of the waste bin and it spilled, red cherries splurting out of the crust, rolling down the sides of the bin to the floor. The whole kitchen was overrun with its sticky sweet aroma. Then their father left, and the two children knelt around the waste bin, scooping berries back into the dish, into the trash, before their mother could find it.

Laura plucked the most intact of the cherries out of the mess and gave it to her brother. He ate it and sucked the juice from his fingers, miserable in knowing that he should have listened to her. They could have shared the secret of the pie together, safe from judgment and disappointment. He should have lied.

The Keeper thought a lot about that pie.

With his mallet buried in another skull, he watched the blood and brain ooze across the metal. The bits rolled off each point like smashed berries and the stench of them was everywhere, their fluids staining the pale stone of the catacomb walls. He jerked his arm back, and what remained of the body crumbled into a mound of pulp. Reaching into the slop, he felt around for anything of value. His victim had been a woman, once. A nurse, he thought. Now she was only meat, her memories scattered to the nightmare. He had successfully purged all humanity from the flesh and her raw materials would sustain them all a little longer.

The Keeper moved on, seeking fresher victims. Those with the most to hide made for the most enticing prey. Secrets were his trade, after all. He knew the value of silence, the strength required to maintain it, the even greater strength required to wrench it free. And what better hunting ground than the depths of the old church? A labyrinth of horrors crafted from his god's imagination stretched before him, waiting to ensnare and punish every hapless visitor. So much of his world was tangled in half-formed memory, or was cobbled together from the perceptions of dozens of subjects, but not this place. Not one soul within STEM had ever traversed the centuries old lab of an ancient, foolhardy religion. Only whispers and rumors cemented its foundations, drawn from the mind of a child who every night would wonder why Father didn't return home with them after Sunday service.

It was also, not coincidentally, the furthest point from the lighthouse wherein The Keeper's master resided.

Someone entered the catacombs. The Keeper felt the presence like a spider at the center of a web, tiny flies plucking his strings. It did not interest him at first. Sooner or later, anyone who entered his temple would find themselves splattered across his mallet; there was no need for haste. But then he sensed the presence of Him. His master was at his doorstep. It only lasted a moment, but if God was willing to descend for the sake of damning one trapped soul to his care, he could do nothing but respond with the utmost attention.

The Keeper prepped his stage. He laid the traps, he the lured the bait. He looked forward to Sebastian Castellanos crumbling beneath his iron. Oh the secrets that could be harvested from a man such as him, who had so successfully captured his master's attention. He could smell on him the agony of loss that was so rewarding to extract. Ruben would be grateful to feast on that pain, The Keeper was sure of it. It would be a fitting offering.

Castellanos came. He was a greater challenge than The Keeper anticipated, and his first death cracked him open, spilling his blood. He thought of cherries rolling out of a dish. But Ruben had so many secrets worth keeping, he had no trouble latching onto the next for new strength. For every iron skull that Castellanos burst, another rose in its place. The entirety of a wretched upbringing made up his arsenal. He was determined to earn his master's favor.

In the end, Castellanos got the better of him. He broke free of the catacombs and Ruben reclaimed him, dragging his battle-weary soul back into the heart of the asylum for other beasts to try their hand against. The Keeper remained in his labyrinth, defeated. He had lost his chance. He had failed all expectations set for him.

He remembered Ruben as a boy, creeping into the barn during the slaughter of the pigs. Father trusted so few of his hands with anything, let alone his prized ham, so he would often string up the animal himself, bleed and butcher them, the fat oozing down his apron. How powerful he had seemed then, taking life so effortlessly, molding the body of another creature to his purpose. It was the closest Ruben had ever come to respecting the man that had sired him.

The Keeper thought a lot about those pigs.

He drew himself back up. He picked a new secret to adorn his broad shoulders and moved on, back to his work. All he could do was be the Minotaur his master had created him to be.

And then he heard it: not an intruder, not a visitor. It was tapping come from high above, somewhere within the layers of the dream. He wasn't the only hunter Ruben had given birth to, apparently. He heard the tap tap, tap tap, echoing down his sinews. He heard the squeal of rusty hinges. One of his secrets had taken legs of its own and wandered off.

How long had it been free, he wondered. What secret had he failed to protect? The Keeper hefted his mallet and his sack and struck out in search.

Krimson City. It was another playground that Ruben had no personal experience in, but rather than being assembled from his fancy, it had been cobbled together from the minds of doctors and nurses, patients and cops. Its architecture was weak. Ruben had no care for skyscrapers, fashion billboards, subways, bistros. He fractured their landscapes as easily as their sanities. The Keeper took no more greater pleasure in the city than he did, and instead his hunt led him into the dwellings—homes crammed together between the stores, apartments stacked on each other. Some of them belonged to STEM's inhabitants, and for a while The Keeper took pleasure in seeking them out. He shoved trinkets from their histories into his bag, plucked from their mutilated corpses. It was a different sensation for him, hunting them down in their own lairs instead of his.

Up until Castellanos showed up again. The Keeper fought hard, as he always did, but redemption eluded him. And as he lay there in the meat locker, he heard it again: tap tap, tap tap. A secret was still loose. He adorned himself in unspoken humiliations and he followed.

The Keeper followed each faint reverberation down into the underground, where the air was stale and water dripped from cracked cement. He followed them through pitch dark into a cold chamber made of stone. There, he found her: a shattered light atop columns of teeth in a dirty sheet. A pair of heels that clacked with every step. She was unsteady on her feet, blood on her knees and bits of glass in her skin. She turned toward him and her head rocked back and forth on her shoulders in danger of falling. She had failed as much as he had, and The Keeper was filled with mixed pity and disgust.

_You shouldn't be here_ , The Keeper told her as he approached, and she swayed warily. _You'll displease our master._

"Leslie," she replied defiantly.

She had no means to fight him off, and they both knew it. The Keeper dropped his sack and instead put both hands to his mallet, wielding it into her already damaged skull. The metal clanged and roared beneath his might. When he dropped his mallet and pulled her close she fought anyway, kicking at him with her heels, biting with her lateral jaws. She tore hunks from him but he didn't care, and with one hand he gripped her shell with the other plunged into her face. She wailed, she struggled, but he ripped the heart out of her, and as he gripped her bloodied trinket it his fist, he remembered.

He remembered Ruben as a young teenager banished to the cellar. His flesh ached with every movement and his stomach clenched with hunger. He bloodied his fingers carving his craft into the walls and his mind whirled with ambition, and agony, and betrayal. And somewhere in the mansion above, he heard it: the tap tap, tap tap of Mother's heels as she paced the halls. Her voice echoed down the foundations, calling for him. She couldn't find him. She needed him and she couldn't find him. Where was her darling boy? He never answered. Why did he not answer?

And deep within that memory hid the secret: he had wanted to.

The Keeper cradled the trinket in his hands. He couldn't fathom how it had escaped him. But instead of putting it in his sack with the others, he held it close as he marched on, deeper into their master's nightmare. Maybe Shade could still succeed where he had failed.

Castellanos was coming. The Keeper picked his battleground, fortified with a legion of the recently mad, for him to make his stand. In his safe he kept the blood on Father's apron, and in another, he planted the sound of Mother's heels. She took shape at his side, no longer the Shade she had made herself, but no less determined in her mission. Their master's eye was on them, and as they lay in wait, they shared an understanding that there were no opportunities left. If they failed again, only the Amalgam awaited them.

The enemy came. The Keeper and his shadow faced him with all the hatred of a lifetime, fueled by injustice, vengeance, even hope. Their wielded their stored trinkets as weapons and bloodied Castellanos against their spears. As always, it wasn't enough. With bolts and bullets he countered their every attack, he lured them into tight spaces, he used the tools of the nightmare against them. His secrets had already been laid bare and they had no means of controlling him. The Keeper fought to his last, but in the end his blood was out. He sank to his knees, Shade beside him, and Castellanos continued on.

The nightmare was falling apart. There were so few minds left to sustain it, and The Keeper felt its edges falling away, the memories dissolving into static, the souls fusing into an unintelligible mass. Soon even he would be absorbed like all the rest, and he welcomed his fate. As a blade in the palisade at least he would finally be of use. His flesh melted away, safe clattering to the tile, his shadow beside him. They waited together for the end.

And then their God descended. His bare feet tapped lightly on the water-slick floors, his robe fluttered as he walked. He stopped before his servants and viewed them with scorn. He was tempted to destroy him himself, and for that, The Keeper couldn't blame him. They were, after all, crafted from the darkest of his memories he would have preferred to forget, misshapen and grotesque, not unlike the beast he'd made of his own sister's legacy. They deserved to be obliterated. But then he paused. He retrieved the sack of bloody trinkets The Keeper had fetched for him and then crouched down. He turned the safe's over and reached into their meat, drawing their hearts from them.

"You served me well," he said. "And you'll serve me still, in the world I'll make." He stood, clasping their oozing flesh to his chest, their stains on his fingers. "You are me, after all."

He welcomed them, but not into the Amalgam as The Keeper had assumed: he took them deeper than that, into himself, into the fabric of his makeup. He hardened them into the chrysalis that would follow him into his second life. Shade swelled and sang with their accomplishment— _Leslie, found_ —but to The Keeper all that mattered was another chance to serve at his master's side. He could be strength and awe, again. He could mete out life and death, he could keep the secrets protected. He would never let them slip free again.

In the end, they never did defeat Castellanos. But they escaped together, into a new body, a new world, warm and ripe for the taking.


End file.
